As artificial intelligence continues to expand, so does the infrastructure needed to power it. In Kern County, proposed AI data centers are raising questions among residents and community organizers about how much water and electricity the facilities will use, what benefits they will bring, and how much say residents will have in the projects.

Those concerns were the focus of a September 19 Liberation Forum hosted by the local Party for Socialism and Liberation chapter in Bakersfield. The forum, titled “Equal vs. Big Tech,” brought together educators, labor organizers and community members to discuss the potential impacts of AI data centers being proposed throughout the county.

Cass, a teacher, labor organizer, and Kern County native, said the discussion was not about opposing artificial intelligence itself, but about who benefits from the technology and who bears the costs of building the infrastructure behind it.

“We are not anti-AI,” Cass said. “What we are against is for-profit AI. AI that makes money for the tech companies rather than for us, the working class.”

Cass said the infrastructure needed to support large-scale AI could place additional demands on communities already dealing with limited water supplies, energy costs and environmental concerns. She pointed to water use, fossil fuel pollution, noise, electronic waste and the mining of rare-earth materials as issues residents should consider when evaluating new data centers.

During the forum, Cass identified three proposed projects in Kern County: a data center in Elk Hills by Beacon AI Centers, a project in Inyokern by R&L Capital and another project in northern Kern County near Formosa by NY Green Cloud.

She said the Inyokern project could use between 12 million and 16 million gallons of water annually, while the Elk Hills project could use about 600,000 gallons, in addition to water needed to top off the systems. She also said the Inyokern proposal includes plans for 40 diesel generators and that the Elk Hills project has entered the county’s conditional-use permitting process.

The figures presented at the forum were part of the speakers’ broader argument that residents need more information about the long-term resource demands of the projects before they are approved.

Lalo Juarez, an environmental science teacher and union organizer who also spoke at the forum, focused on the amount of electricity required to operate large data centers. He argued that the county should consider whether its existing infrastructure can accommodate the additional demand and who ultimately pays for upgrades.

Juarez also discussed the water required to cool data center equipment, saying that other cooling technologies are available but can require greater upfront investment. He questioned whether communities should bear the environmental and infrastructure costs associated with facilities primarily built to serve large technology companies.

For Cass, the concerns surrounding water use are personal.

She recalled growing up near the Kern River and seeing periods when there was little or no water flowing through the riverbed. She said seeing water return to the river after her son was born changed the way she viewed the community and its future.

“It made the city feel a little more hopeful, a little more beautiful, a little more like this is a place where I want to stay,” she said.

That experience, she said, has made the prospect of additional water demands particularly concerning.

Cass argued that decisions about large infrastructure projects should include the people who live in the communities where those projects are being built, particularly when they involve resources such as water and electricity.

Another speaker, Jason Cosper, framed the issue less around artificial intelligence itself and more around public accountability for the technology and infrastructure surrounding it.

“What we are trying to do is not about AI. It is about accountability,” Cosper said.

Cosper compared the discussion over data centers to concerns about other technologies that can affect communities without residents having meaningful control over how they are deployed. He pointed to surveillance cameras as an example of technology that can become part of everyday life while raising questions about who owns it, who controls it, and how the public can hold those responsible accountable.

He also questioned the long-term environmental footprint of data center hardware, noting that the technology inside the facilities can change much faster than the buildings themselves.

“The community carries the resource use and the footprint for decades,” Cosper said. “The value inside turns over every few years, and honestly, whoever owns the chips captures that value.”

The forum ultimately returned to a broader question: how much control should communities have over infrastructure built to support rapidly developing technology?

For Cass, that question comes back to the resources Kern County residents already depend on.

“We will continue to stand up for our people, for our community, for our water and for our livelihood,” she said.

The proposed data centers remain subject to the applicable county and environmental review processes. The forum speakers’ claims about projected water use, employment, and infrastructure impacts were presented as part of the discussion and should be compared with project applications and information from the developers and county agencies as those reviews continue.